My style of retouching has always been somewhat ‘cartoonish’. I don’t aim for realism, but instead for an image that has a certain feeling … and for male fitness shoots that feeling is ‘gritty’ in a dramatic way. So: Strong local contrast, not clean skin, dark background. Fitness shots also should emphasize the muscles, making them stand out with highlights and shadows. That’s best done with strong side lighting, but sometimes the model moves around especially when shooting more action-oriented poses and an otherwise great image is lacking in contrast.

This happened with Rodger this week. Great image but a bit flat. Here’s the original and the retouched version:

The process is relatively straightforward:

Fix any imperfections in the image: Spots in the background, unwanted models/zits/wrinkles in the skin etc. I did not do any skin smoothing and only minimal fixes for most distracting moles etc.

Dodge & burn to fix shadows and highlights. In this image I did minor fixing of dark shadows under his eyes and removed some of the blush from his neck.

Add local contrast to bring out the muscle definition. I use NIK Color Efex Pro 4 toolset a lot, and for this the Tonal Contrast filter is good. I masked it out completely and then painted it back on the mask as needed. For this photo I needed quite a bit of contrast to many areas were 100% revealed:

Now I have good muscle definition, but I want the photo to have slightly more ‘gritty’ feel. There are multiple ways of getting that, but simplest in this case was to run the same Tonal Contrast filter again and paint in contrast to selected areas:

I whitened his eyes a little.

Final step is to add a slight dark gradient at the bottom of the image. This makes the model blend better with the background and also focuses eye on the important part of the image (his upper body and face).

That’s it. In retrospective there are few things I’d do differently if I was shooting this again:

I spent some quality time figuring out his post-processing workflow (i.e. I googled like a maniac and read dozens of forum threads full of speculation and experimentation). Figured out pretty quickly that there really is no easy way to a great picture (what a surprise!), but instead lots of small things that have to work right. Light it, shoot it, then Photoshop it.

This is my version of the “Alvarado Look”. It’s not quite the same, I like more saturation than what he has and I wasn’t going for a real vintage look. So maybe I shouldn’t even call it Alvarado Look, but just my own thing:

So how to do it? I knew I wanted to have a white background and to have an even light on the model, with good separation from the background. I shot against white cyc wall with model standing on white tile board for a clean white floor and to get a slight reflection. The lighting setup is pretty simple:

Bare bulb strobes (PCB Einstein) pointing at white bi-fold doors. The doors reflect the light to the white cyc wall with nice even spread, and they also block any direct flight from falling on the model.

Megalomanically large PCB 86” Parabolic umbrella with white diffusion fabric in place. The umbrella center is at model mid-section level, and it’s big enough to light her evenly from head to toe.

Photographer squatting in the front of the umbrella. Again it’s big enough, and diffused enough, that small ol’ me is not blocking much of the light.

Meter background 1.5 stops above the model. Meter model at f/9.0. Put a card in my camera and shoot away. Straight out of camera shot, and the final post-processed image:

Now, post-processing. My basic process is the same for all photos:

Import all photos to main drive and an external backup drive.

Use Photo Mechanic to weed down the original 150-200 photos to 15-20 keepers. Select the 2 or 3 I want to post-process for final versions.

Import to Lightroom 5 and do the basic color settings:

Apply my studio light profile created with X-Rite ColorChecker.

Apply color balance based on grey card model held in the first test shot.

Tweak the Exposure, Highlights and Blacks to get even white background and some good contrast on the model. I don’t usually do anything else in Lightroom.

Export to TIFF to edit in Photoshop CC.

Clean up the background.

Retouch the model:

Clean out any imperfections from the skin (zits, bruises etc).

Smooth out skin without destroying the texture.

Stylize to taste

All in all I ended up with 11 layers in Photoshop. This might be a bit excessive, but I like to keep every step on its own later so I can easily go back and tweak the image without redoing everything. To that end I like to use smart layers as much as possible to make this even easier.

So the interesting part is the “Stylize”. I did a lot of experimentation, and this was the final workflow:

Use Imagenomic Portraiture to smooth out her skin. I try to be very gentle with skin smoothing, but in this case I went in with heavier settings to get an unrealistically smooth skin.

Use the RAW filter to punch out the contrast. The settings depend on the image, lighting and personal preferences and require quite a bit of experimentation. Here are the settings I ended up using:

Run Nik Color Efex Pro 4 / Tonal Contrast on the image to add even more contrast.

Add Hue/Saturation layer to bring master and red saturation down by few notches.

Do some cloning to fix visible veins and rough skin in her legs. The added contrast made these more visible.

Run Imagenomic Portraiture again to smooth out the skin made rougher by added contrast.

The added contrast is the important part. If you look at old pin-up photos and paintings, you see how the roundness of legs and arms is well-defined by the light: Bright in the middle, falling of to much darker on the edges, giving impression of a round and 3-dimensional limb. Now a real master of light would do this well straight out of camera. I’m not a master, so I’ll fake it in Photoshop:

That’s it! Now the result is not perfect. There are few things I’d do differently if I was to shoot this again:

Background is too bright and is bleeding through on her hair, making the ends look brittle.

I should have cleaned her legs more, especially her knee looks a bit rough.